Envelope Sender in badmailfrom list

Don't you agree? Some error messages are just plain annoying nonsense. This one is another perfect example and can be found when you send an email:

sorry, your envelope sender is in my badmailfrom list (#5.7.1).

I don't think this error exclusively applies to the web hosting company GoDaddy because it looks like the default error message in a product they use, but they are certainly in the crossfire here.

This badmailfrom list message might be meaningful and actually useful if you are the administrator of the SMTP server but as a hosting company this error rings through to their clients.

Whatever the reason, following is an explanation why the error for your envelope sender actually shows up when you send an email.

SMTP Relay

The error is a problem with the SMTP relay and in case of GoDaddy they have some special setup. They use two different relay setups depending on where you are connecting from. It's so special that not even their support is capable of creating documents that show up in their knowledge base or Google. I have not found it where you think you will find it and it requires a lot of guessing. Beats me why they are not interested in clearly communicating the proper setup.

External relay

If you have an account with GoDaddy and wish to send an email from your application but you are hosting the application outside their network you can do that. This is basically what you do with your email client. In that case you will use their relay SMTP agent as follows:

SMTP Server: smtpout.secureserver.net

This relay requires a username and password which is any of your GoDaddy email accounts

There is a tiny little problem, though. This is almost exclusively intended for your email client software like Microsoft's Outlook, Mozilla's Thunderbird and others. They expect that the sender address in the email head—envelope sender—is an account that matches one of your GoDaddy email domains. If this email sender is not one of your email accounts with GoDaddy it is automatically treated as in "my badmailfrom list."

So far so good if you only use it with your email client because that's the regular case. If you have a web application with a sign up form you may want to use the SMTP relay a little bit differently, though.

If you have a form and once the user hits the submit button you may want to send an email to some email inbox. You may also want to set the email address provided by the requester as the sender's email address; as if s/he send the email. With that you could easily hit the reply button in your email client and send your answer to the request and also easily add it to your address book.

That's not in GoDaddy's mind and when you will run into the error above. You cannot use the user's email address to send the email to your whatever email account over their agent. Although you provide a valid user account and password they verify the sender's email address, too.

Use Reply-To instead

So first, make sure you use your account as the sender in the email head. Second, you can use the user's email address in the Reply-To field. With the user's email address in that field you can still hit the reply button when you receive the email and respond to the request. Adding the sender to your contacts will probably not work, though.

Internal relay

If you have your web application on a server with GoDaddy you have to use a different configuration. If you use this configuration for sending emails from your web application you will face another problem.

Your application will timeout and get a "Connection time out" error. We can only speculate but I think they simply don't have a routing from the internal network to their outside SMTP relay address. It beats me why not.

Because setting up the internal relay has a similar problem but different error message I have a separate document. The config and potential problem with that error message is in the document titled Administratively Denied.